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Researchers at Texas A&M University have announced that the world's first cloned cat has given birth to a litter of three healthy kittens.

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The mother, called CC, short for Copy Cat, was born in December 2001 using the same procedure pioneered by researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh to clone Dolly the sheep in 1997. Genetic material taken from the cell of a tabby cat was used to create a cloned embryo, which was then implanted into a surrogate feline.

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Since CC’s birth, commercial cloning services have begun offering their services to clone lost or dead pets with one US company having created six cloned cats, for a fee of more than £20,000. However, the project that created CC proved that cloning could not be relied upon to create an identical copy of an animal. The researchers discovered that fur patterning is determined in the womb rather than by genes, CC therefore did not look like her genetic mother.

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Cloning has also been found to lead to imperfections in the way genes are expressed in the developing embryo and the vast majority of cloning attempts fail as a result. Dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell and died prematurely from progressive lung disease at the age of six.

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In Britain, the government's Animal Procedures Committee has recommended that licenses to clone pets be disallowed.

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